Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Managing Energy with Real Time Demand Response

A leading provider of cloud‐based energy intelligence software (EIS)
and services to thousands of enterprise customers and utilities globally
leverages BPM well. While this company sells EIS for corporate energy
management, part of its solution uses discrete software to drive a service
called “demand response,” which enables companies to curtail energy usage in
exchange for payment from energy suppliers. Examples of curtailing include dimming
lights, adjusting the temperature in a store, or shifting a production line
schedule to a different time of day.

The Challenge:

As part of its digital transformation, this company needed
an automated system to help make the notifications and curtailment process run
smoothly and efficiently during demand response dispatches. Using BPM software,
they created a call‐and‐answer mechanism to notify providers
when they need to start curtailing that triggers a notification back to this
organization from the customers’ site that indicates, "Yes, we heard you."
This starts the curtailing process: customers reduce their energy use according
to a pre‐set
strategy, and this broker monitors the reductions and calculates the resulting
payments. Once the dispatch window has passed, the broker sends another
notification, alerting providers to stop curtailing and resume normal operations.
Anytime a new technology is introduced, there is doubt and resistance. To
overcome natural resistance to change, the broker developed a proof‐of‐concept
and used it to show employees that it was a much better solution than the
previous practice.

The Solution:

Implementing a BPM solution provides an automated process
with manual overrides if needed. This changes the human involvement from actively
executing the process to monitoring and addressing occasional exceptions through
manual overrides. This has eliminated the need for employees to set self‐reminders and has reduced the human
error element from the curtailing process. It has also increased the
scalability of the brokers demand response infrastructure. Employees now focus
on monitoring what’s going on and dealing with exceptions to process
automations. Productivity has improved as a result. Employee adoption has been
excellent, as the tool itself is an enabler for doing efficient work. Internal
demand for BPM is high now as the broker further integrates the software, the
company is building an internal program to help define current processes,
identify problems and develop new processes.

The Benefits:

The automation and streamlining of the end‐to‐end
demand response journey resulted in several levels of benefit. This first step
in the digital transformation has set a great precedent for embracing
digitization across the board. The operators that are running BPM are able to
easily handle more of the traffic that goes through on the days when curtailing
takes place than they were prior to the deployment. The company is able to
scale better and there is less human interaction in terms of monitoring, reducing
human error. The system manages itself. Set it up in advance of an event and it
runs through specific programs that previously set up – easy.

The elimination or reduction of human interaction within
the orchestrated workflow has reduced the human error that can sneak in. The
quality of the curtailment event has improved in that the broker has
predictable and well‐execute
curtailments during the day. The quality has improved and it is consistent. The
BPM has reduced human involvement from active to passive – which is a positive
thing.

Net; Net:

BPM allows organizations to scale with lower risk and to
grow the business. BPM has helped this broker to stay at the forefront of innovation
and deliver on more scalable and efficient promises to its customers.